Many companies work with highly complex, distributed supplier networks to deliver products profitably to the global marketplace. To gain a competitive edge, companies have shifted to horizontal or completely outsourced manufacturing models. As companies increasingly depend on suppliers to provide the critical parts and assemblies that make up their products, the effective management of these parts and the approved suppliers of the parts are paramount to success. Price changes, supply shortages, delivery, manufacturability, and quality problems associated with these parts can all impact a company's ability to deliver its products. Business partners work together to ensure their products' components meet the technical, business, and supply chain requirements of their products.
A bill of materials is commonly used in the product sourcing and product manufacturing processes. A bill of materials typically contains data regarding various components, elements, services, processes, etc. that make up a product, a service, a process, a project, or the like. Parties involved in the manufacture and distribution of various parts and components, such as engineers, contract manufacturers and supply chain partners would make inquiries regarding a particular component.
Traditional searches typically operate on a two-dimensional relational data structure in which search inquires include only one level of hierarchical data values. For example, a typical conventional search inquiry states “Give all assemblies whose product line is Scorpio.” Only one hierarchical level, i.e., all assemblies for a product line, is involved in this inquiry.
In addition, traditional searches make inquiries on a target in its unchanged state, but it is not effective in searching for a search target that has multiple revisions. For example, a traditional search for “all assemblies whose contain indirectly other assemblies that contain all pending released revisions” is awkward and inefficient.
However, sometimes engineers, contract manufacturers and supply chain partners often need to inquire whether a particular component is being used by other assemblies, where it is being used, what the top-level assembly is for the component, and which revision of the assembly it is etc. Conventional search operations based on two-dimensional data structure having only one level of hierarchy is not suitable for this type of data search for data having multiple revisions in a hierarchical structure.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and a method for performing where-used searches for data with multiple revisions in a multi-level hierarchical structure in an efficient manner.